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I want a US based bank to build something like that. I believe Simple was initially supposed to expose an API to developers. The API has never come to fruition

I want a US based bank to build something like that. I believe Simple was initially supposed to expose an API to developers. The API has never come to fruition and I doubt ever will. In order to disrupt the banking industry, you need a huge amount of capital to start and you are regulated in a way to prevent fast growth. These 2 things pretty much rule out the 'standard' way of doing startups. I would love to see an opensource bank, open code all the way down to the core services that a bank depends on. It would help break up the stranglehold that just a handful of companies have on the market. Too many things are just 'in the way'. The stagnation would probably need to start with regulatory support instead of using banking regulations to make it difficult for new business and ideas.

jMyles 11y ago
These sorts of hopes seem to be the primary impetus for the "next generation" blockchain tech, such as Counterparty and Etherium.
ksred 11y ago
In South Africa we have the same situation, no access to banking APIs so little room for innovation. As a side project I decided to try and build banking infrastructure from the ground up, learning Go in the process [1], writing about the development along the way [2]. There is so much room for innovation in the traditional banking space, i.e. not using cryptocurrencies. Hopefully there will be innovation, especially when it comes to managing risk. [1] https://github.com/ksred/bank https://github.com/ksred/bank [2] http://blog.ksred.me/tags/banking-infrastructure/ http://blog.ksred.me/tags/banking-infrastructure/
MrOwen 11y ago
I took a look at the data Simple returns at some point a while back and it seemed (upon just an initial glance) that it would be fairly straightforward to extract data from. Everything that you saw on-screen could also be found in just a handful of JSON data points. Obviously there's the issue of constructing some kluge-y authentication mechanism which in and of itself would be insecure. But if you wanted the data, Simple by no means obfuscated it.
- redbeard0x0a 11y ago
  They don't obfuscate it, but i want a SUPPORTED method of accessing my banking data programatically.
  - MrOwen 11y ago
    I agree. I've tweeted @Simple to see if they want to add anything to this thread. Although for a while now, their blog and Twitter feed have been filled with more "goal" posts/tweets than feature related things. And like others have said, their plans for an official API are probably non-existent.
    - jrowley 11y ago
      They do allow exporting transactions to JSON and CSV, so that could be a starting point if you're willing to work with the challenges of authentication. https://www.simple.com/help/articles/account-info/statements-and-export https://www.simple.com/help/articles/account-info/statements...
  - RickS 11y ago
    This is an important distinction. Simple's API is not secret, but it's also not stable, or versioned, or anything close to that. Tools have been written to extract data from simple's API, but those endpoints have mostly been discovered through unofficial channels, and Simple often changes them without issuing any kind of warning. So far twitter has been the best route to find about their changing API endpoints, which speaks simultaneously to the disorganization of the API and the massively high quality of their support team.
jhuckestein 11y ago
Hi redbeard0x0a, fully agree! We do try to open source as much as possible. We have open-sourced large parts of our stack already: https://github.com/mondough/ https://github.com/mondough/
tim333 11y ago
>you need a huge amount of capital to start and you are regulated in a way to prevent fast growth. These 2 things pretty much rule out the 'standard' way of doing startups. Mondo have raised 2 million pounds and "are looking to raise around £15-20 million before its full launch" so not that much more than many startups. Not sure about regulation preventing fast growth. I guess it slows it a bit.
- dbbk 11y ago
  In terms of regulation, the UK government is actually in the process of getting ALL banks to open up their data with APIs. It's really exciting: http://theodi.org/news/open-banking-working-group-uk-experts-impact-consumers-regulators-industry http://theodi.org/news/open-banking-working-group-uk-experts... "In this year’s Budget the Chancellor committed to delivering an open API standard in UK banking, and setting out a detailed framework for its design by the end of 2015, in order to help drive more competition and innovation in banking for the benefit of consumers."
  - simonvc 11y ago
    Late to this thread, but some of us at Mondo are actually on the OBWG. You could consider Mondo's API a sneak peak of what's coming from potentially all banks in 3 or so years.
    - dbbk 11y ago
      What a time to be alive
s73v3r 11y ago
To be perfectly honest, though, the 'standard' way of doing startups is a terrible idea when you're talking about people's savings.
- jhuckestein 11y ago
  I work at Mondo. People's savings are generally insured in banks. Once we're a bank, customer funds up to £75k per account will be insured via FSCS. In the meantime, the customer balances held on our prepaid debit card sit ringfenced in customer-specific accounts. If we went bankrupt, the funds can't be touched by our creditors and will simply be returned to the customers. Edit: spelling
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Can I create an account with you if I'm an EU citizen, or is it UK-only?
    - jhuckestein 11y ago
      I've responded to the same question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623845
jessedhillon 11y ago
I have accounts at Chase, Citi, Capital One and a small credit union. All of them support exchanging of statements through OFX. I wrote a small Python script around ofxclient[0] which downloads daily statements from all of these accounts and then merges them into a GNU Ledger-formatted text file. I was inspired to do this when GNU Ledger was on the front page here about a month ago[1]. I keep the ledger itself version controlled using git. It's been working great -- the script not only downloads the statements but also identifies certain keywords in the payee name and attributes those against the matched expense account. [0] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ofxclient/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ofxclient/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510394
- cableshaft 11y ago
  Thank you for letting me know that you can do this. I'd like to try combining that info with the Civilization Budget (http://alexrecker.com/our-new-sid-meiers-civilization-inspired-budget/ http://alexrecker.com/our-new-sid-meiers-civilization-inspir...) that was posted a couple weeks ago.
  - jessedhillon 11y ago
    Sure, glad to help. If you have any questions about how I did it, send me an email (it's in my profile) and I can try to answer them.
z3t4 11y ago
You could start with Bitcoin only, then when you are big enough you can start with other currencies too.
xux 11y ago
> I would love to see an opensource bank, open code all the way down to the core services that a bank depends on Yeah, no thanks. I would not trust my money with a bank like that. A lot of fraud prevention is based on obscurity, and multiple steps of hurdles to make it easy to reverse a transaction. There's a reason money transfer takes a few days. Source: I work in a tangential field
- jhuckestein 11y ago
  I take your point that you wouldn't want to open source everything, especially not the few critically secure bits of your infrastructure. That said, money transfers take a couple of days because most interbank clearing houses were modelled after paper-based batch processes where people shuffle through paper a few times a day. There are several real-time payment schemes in the world. Retail customers in the UK mostly use Faster Payments (FPS) for interbank transfers and they clear within a few seconds.
  - MagicNarwhal 11y ago
    Security through obscurity hasn't been a powerful or useful paradigm for at least a decade now. The only thing that it provides now is more time for malicious users to exploit security holes before anyone notices.
    - ketralnis 11y ago
      I don't agree. Nobody is claiming that it should be the only layer, but as one layer of many a little bit of obscurity goes a long way. For instance, reddit provides it's public source code but has all of its anti fraud stuff wrapped into a separate repo that is not public. This provides a lot of flexibility that wouldn't be available if it were all public. And sure, some of it is of temporary value ("we are catching this cheating teqnique specifically, until they realise that it's not working anymore") but the fraud arms race is much easier for the atackee if it is slowed down a bit by such temporary measures
- kalleboo 11y ago

jMyles 11y ago

These sorts of hopes seem to be the primary impetus for the "next generation" blockchain tech, such as Counterparty and Etherium.

ksred 11y ago

In South Africa we have the same situation, no access to banking APIs so little room for innovation. As a side project I decided to try and build banking infrastructure from the ground up, learning Go in the process [1], writing about the development along the way [2]. There is so much room for innovation in the traditional banking space, i.e. not using cryptocurrencies. Hopefully there will be innovation, especially when it comes to managing risk. [1] https://github.com/ksred/bank https://github.com/ksred/bank [2] http://blog.ksred.me/tags/banking-infrastructure/ http://blog.ksred.me/tags/banking-infrastructure/

MrOwen 11y ago

I took a look at the data Simple returns at some point a while back and it seemed (upon just an initial glance) that it would be fairly straightforward to extract data from. Everything that you saw on-screen could also be found in just a handful of JSON data points. Obviously there's the issue of constructing some kluge-y authentication mechanism which in and of itself would be insecure. But if you wanted the data, Simple by no means obfuscated it.

redbeard0x0a 11y ago
They don't obfuscate it, but i want a SUPPORTED method of accessing my banking data programatically.
- MrOwen 11y ago
  I agree. I've tweeted @Simple to see if they want to add anything to this thread. Although for a while now, their blog and Twitter feed have been filled with more "goal" posts/tweets than feature related things. And like others have said, their plans for an official API are probably non-existent.
  - jrowley 11y ago
    They do allow exporting transactions to JSON and CSV, so that could be a starting point if you're willing to work with the challenges of authentication. https://www.simple.com/help/articles/account-info/statements-and-export https://www.simple.com/help/articles/account-info/statements...
- RickS 11y ago
  This is an important distinction. Simple's API is not secret, but it's also not stable, or versioned, or anything close to that. Tools have been written to extract data from simple's API, but those endpoints have mostly been discovered through unofficial channels, and Simple often changes them without issuing any kind of warning. So far twitter has been the best route to find about their changing API endpoints, which speaks simultaneously to the disorganization of the API and the massively high quality of their support team.

jhuckestein 11y ago

Hi redbeard0x0a, fully agree! We do try to open source as much as possible. We have open-sourced large parts of our stack already: https://github.com/mondough/ https://github.com/mondough/

tim333 11y ago

>you need a huge amount of capital to start and you are regulated in a way to prevent fast growth. These 2 things pretty much rule out the 'standard' way of doing startups. Mondo have raised 2 million pounds and "are looking to raise around £15-20 million before its full launch" so not that much more than many startups. Not sure about regulation preventing fast growth. I guess it slows it a bit.

dbbk 11y ago
In terms of regulation, the UK government is actually in the process of getting ALL banks to open up their data with APIs. It's really exciting: http://theodi.org/news/open-banking-working-group-uk-experts-impact-consumers-regulators-industry http://theodi.org/news/open-banking-working-group-uk-experts... "In this year’s Budget the Chancellor committed to delivering an open API standard in UK banking, and setting out a detailed framework for its design by the end of 2015, in order to help drive more competition and innovation in banking for the benefit of consumers."
- simonvc 11y ago
  Late to this thread, but some of us at Mondo are actually on the OBWG. You could consider Mondo's API a sneak peak of what's coming from potentially all banks in 3 or so years.
  - dbbk 11y ago
    What a time to be alive

s73v3r 11y ago

To be perfectly honest, though, the 'standard' way of doing startups is a terrible idea when you're talking about people's savings.

jhuckestein 11y ago
I work at Mondo. People's savings are generally insured in banks. Once we're a bank, customer funds up to £75k per account will be insured via FSCS. In the meantime, the customer balances held on our prepaid debit card sit ringfenced in customer-specific accounts. If we went bankrupt, the funds can't be touched by our creditors and will simply be returned to the customers. Edit: spelling
- StavrosK 11y ago
  Can I create an account with you if I'm an EU citizen, or is it UK-only?
  - jhuckestein 11y ago
    I've responded to the same question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623845

jessedhillon 11y ago

I have accounts at Chase, Citi, Capital One and a small credit union. All of them support exchanging of statements through OFX. I wrote a small Python script around ofxclient[0] which downloads daily statements from all of these accounts and then merges them into a GNU Ledger-formatted text file. I was inspired to do this when GNU Ledger was on the front page here about a month ago[1]. I keep the ledger itself version controlled using git. It's been working great -- the script not only downloads the statements but also identifies certain keywords in the payee name and attributes those against the matched expense account. [0] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ofxclient/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ofxclient/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10510394

cableshaft 11y ago
Thank you for letting me know that you can do this. I'd like to try combining that info with the Civilization Budget (http://alexrecker.com/our-new-sid-meiers-civilization-inspired-budget/ http://alexrecker.com/our-new-sid-meiers-civilization-inspir...) that was posted a couple weeks ago.
- jessedhillon 11y ago
  Sure, glad to help. If you have any questions about how I did it, send me an email (it's in my profile) and I can try to answer them.

z3t4 11y ago

You could start with Bitcoin only, then when you are big enough you can start with other currencies too.

xux 11y ago

> I would love to see an opensource bank, open code all the way down to the core services that a bank depends on Yeah, no thanks. I would not trust my money with a bank like that. A lot of fraud prevention is based on obscurity, and multiple steps of hurdles to make it easy to reverse a transaction. There's a reason money transfer takes a few days. Source: I work in a tangential field

jhuckestein 11y ago
I take your point that you wouldn't want to open source everything, especially not the few critically secure bits of your infrastructure. That said, money transfers take a couple of days because most interbank clearing houses were modelled after paper-based batch processes where people shuffle through paper a few times a day. There are several real-time payment schemes in the world. Retail customers in the UK mostly use Faster Payments (FPS) for interbank transfers and they clear within a few seconds.
- MagicNarwhal 11y ago
  Security through obscurity hasn't been a powerful or useful paradigm for at least a decade now. The only thing that it provides now is more time for malicious users to exploit security holes before anyone notices.
  - ketralnis 11y ago
    I don't agree. Nobody is claiming that it should be the only layer, but as one layer of many a little bit of obscurity goes a long way. For instance, reddit provides it's public source code but has all of its anti fraud stuff wrapped into a separate repo that is not public. This provides a lot of flexibility that wouldn't be available if it were all public. And sure, some of it is of temporary value ("we are catching this cheating teqnique specifically, until they realise that it's not working anymore") but the fraud arms race is much easier for the atackee if it is slowed down a bit by such temporary measures
kalleboo 11y ago